We eat with our eyes. That is the reason why food has always had a meaning, a social status and has been used to highlight wealth. And this also means that what we see is what we want even though we might not be hungry, or it could be poisonous. Therefore, we are told not to go grocery shopping when we are hungry because we tend to buy more and things we don’t need or want. But it is also why the arts and the advertising industry use images to attract and charm us.

When I think of food in the arts, I think about artists who have represented food like in still-life paintings or vanitas from the European Masters, of Cezanne’s impressionist apples, or Warhol’s cans of tomato soup. I also think about artists that use food as their material to create artworks. For example, Felix Gonzalez-Torres used candies, like in Untitled (Public Opinion), 1991; Vik Muniz’s series of Pictures of Chocolate; Antony Gormley’s use of bread in his piece Bed, 1980-81; and Kara Walker’s use of sugar for the sculpture in Subtlety, 2014, just to mention a few. 

In both cases I just mentioned, food is central to the creative process. After all it is almost always about how food is presented, arranged, and displayed to make us crave or long for it. Or it is about what it embodies and what it symbolizes. Have you a favorite artist that works with food or depicts food or an artwork that is made with or is about food?